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With the holidays upon us, some of the hottest gifts are e-readers -- the iPad, the Kindle, and the Nook being the big three. However, for college students looking for a reader that will host their textbooks, there's another option that you can't find at a Best Buy: the Kno.

The Kno is a reader that gives students the option between one or two screens. As our sister site Engadget pointed out, it's a mammoth piece of technology -- it's much larger than most other readers (13.1 inches tall and, for the dual screen, 18.3 inches wide). But in software and hardware, let's see how it sizes up to the competition.Hardware

Being a big machine comes with advantages that iPads, Kindles, Nooks, and other tablets don't have. Specifically, it can support a USB drive. The Kno also comes equipped with a microphone, which presumably can be used for note taking. The machine also comes equipped with a stylus pen, which isn't compatible with the iPad. This makes jotting down notes a bit easier than the iPad's typing system, and it also opens the Kno up to be more than just an electronic textbook. With note-taking capabilities, the Internet, and the addition of a USB drive, the Kno is a full-functioning classroom buddy that'll serve more needs than just reading the text.

Web Browsing

Like the iPad, Nook, and Kindle (to a certain degree), the Kno features a Web browser and email support. There isn't much information available on the Web browser. However, the fact that it can even surf the Web gives it a leg up on the competition. The machine comes equipped with WiFi and Bluetooth. And best of all? The Kno supports Adobe Flash, which the iPad famously can't. The one foreseeable downside about the Kno is that there isn't a 3G model at the moment (like with the Kindle and iPad).

Storage

The Kno's storage system is similar to the iPad's -- the low end of storage is 16GB and there's the option for 32GB. Compared to the Nook's 8GB and the Kindle's 4GB, that certainly isn't bad.

This is where the Kno plans on having the upper hand. Yes, there are many digital bookstores for best-selling fiction and nonfiction, but textbooks are in more of a gray area. Every major digital bookstore has them (Google, Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble), but the availability of each book varies. So let's take a look at a few randomly-selected textbooks (from Textbooks.com) in different areas of study to see where they're available and for what prices:

It seems that for textbooks, the Nook has most of the books the Kno has for a cheaper price tag. The difference with "Nookbooks" and Kno e-books is that you can read your Nookbooks on a Nook, Android, iPhone, iPad or a computer. So for a cheaper price and with a variety of devices to read the textbooks with, the Nook seems to be the current leader in the digital textbook race.

The Kno is marketed to be the reader for students. But in today's economy and with today's technology, price and size are everything. Unfortunately, the Kno, with all the positive things to be said for textbooks and note-taking, doesn't win the day with either.

At its cheapest, it's $100 more expensive than an iPad and more than double the price of a Nook Color. At its most expensive, it's the same price as a MacBook Air. The textbooks are more expensive than most used physical copies of the textbooks, and the Nook has nearly all of the same ones for about $10 cheaper every time. And the size? Today's technology has moved everything to be smaller and smaller to the point where our iPods are postage stamps and our computers are almost paper thin. Compared to the other major readers, this thing is huge.

But perhaps that's what today's readers have lost sight of. Maybe people don't just want to read digital books on one thin screen. Maybe it's the weight, size, and double-paged feel of a textbook that's missing in some people's e-reading habits. So maybe by being the elephant in the room, the Kno has an advantage. Ultimately, it depends on how much weight each student wants in his or her backpack and how they feel about the readers that are already out there.